Future FanZine Vol IV – The Ban 

Australia went first, in December 2025, and the world watched. France, Denmark, Turkey, Malaysia, Spain and Greece followed. The EU’s Digital Fairness Act arrives later this year. And earlier this week, the UK announced its own ban, going further than Australia, with restrictions on livestreaming on social platforms, stranger communication and gaming platforms, and default-on protections extended to 16 and 17-year-olds.  

The direction of travel is clear. Country by country, the political consensus, and subsequent legislation, is hardening around the same basic conclusion: children under 16 shouldn’t have unsupervised access to social media, and that platforms can’t be trusted to enforce that themselves. This is a new status quo, not a fringe policy experiment. 

What the short term looks like

For our readers in the U.K. expect the next few weeks to be full of teenagers-with-VPNs stories, borrowed accounts, gaps in age verification. Australia experienced exactly that. The bigger practical problem, and this is something the UK Government is saying they’re learning from, wasn’t teenage ingenuity – it is platform non-compliance. Within days of the ban taking effect, some platforms had removed 4.7 million under-16 accounts. Most children who retained access did so not because they’d found workarounds, but because their accounts simply hadn’t been removed in the first place.

While the evidence remains early, initial indicators from Australia are more positive than many critics predicted. Around 60% of parents reported behavioural improvements in their children. Early mental health signals have exceeded pre-ban expectations; before it took effect, fewer than a third of children and around 40% of parents believed it would improve wellbeing.  

It hasn’t been cost-free, neurodivergent young people and LGBTQ+ teens who relied on these platforms for community have found the shift harder, and that warrants close attention as the evidence develops – but the overall direction is broadly encouraging. 

The more important change, though, isn’t the legislative one: it’s the intended cultural one. It’s fundamentally legislation to stop future adoption, rather than stem the tide of existing usage. Our perspective is that it’s designed to rebalance the ‘pressure’ from peer back to parent. Right now, peer pressure is the most cited reasons parents’ hand over devices earlier than they’d like. Once the ban exists, “everyone else is on it” stops being a reason to give in – and that changes parental behaviour back to one of an active media-controlling state, rather than a passive state.  

The change that was already happening 

The legislation comes into force following a wave of consumer sentiment shifts, as we covered in this piece for The Drum earlier this year. Millennial parents are reassessing their and therefore their child’s – relationship with screens. They are not abandoning digital, but becoming more deliberate about it. And in doing so, they’re rediscovering formats and experiences that had supposedly been displaced. 

With the FIFA Men’s World Cup on it’s top of mind, Panini are more relevant than ever – generating €750m in revenue in 2024, with 40% of their collectors now adults. The sticker album is cross-generational – the kids who did it in the ’80s and ’90s are doing it again with their own children. 

Vinyl sales have grown 18% annually for five years, with Gen Z accounting for around 60% of buyers, many of whom don’t own a turntable. The object and the ritual matter to them in a way that surprises people who assumed digital had won permanently.  

The common thread is a return to deliberate, tangible experiences that are often shared between generations. The 2026 World Cup album is the largest in the format’s history, at 980 stickers. Less nostalgia, more a partial return to tactile, deliberate, parent-mediated media. Physical experiences that require showing up rather than scrolling past.  

What it means for rights holders 

The honest answer is that we don’t yet know exactly how the landscape will reshape. The legislation doesn’t yet make clear whether platforms will be permitted to build age-appropriate versions of their products – a YouTube Kids equivalent for teenagers for example. If that door is open, platforms will move quickly. But even if it is, the evidence from Australia suggests a meaningful subset of under-16s will simply have full access with parental permission, which creates its own set of questions. 

Despite the unknowns, sports organisations are well-placed. The product – at its best – puts parents and children in front of the same thing at the same time, which matters more than it did when the path to young fans ran primarily through a social algorithm. High trust, cross-generational appeal, and a natural fit with the kind of shared, deliberate media experience that parents are increasingly looking for.   

What’s clear is that rights holders now need to think more carefully about how they target younger audiences. If algorithm-driven discovery is not viable, then operated channels are less valuable for the cohort. Naturally, this puts more focus and strategic importance back on owned platforms, broadcast partnerships, physical products, editorial and media licensing strategy. The kids’ section of your website (if it even exists) is now much more than a UX add-on – it’s an audience development tool. 

Parental input comes into greater focus, too. As scrutiny around screentime grows, parents become, once again, the ultimate gatekeepers of engagement, making their trust and approval essential. For rights holders, this means ensuring content is purpose-driven, not just content for content’s sake. The most endearing strategies will be those that reinforce the positive values sport possesses; teamwork, resilience, confidence, individuality and play.  

The research on early fandom is consistent: attachment formed during formative years tends to persist. It drives decades of engagement, advocacy and commercial value. The challenge isn’t whether to invest in younger audiences – it’s how to reach them when the distribution and platform mix has changed. The Future Fan isn’t going anywhere. The organisations that treat the changed distribution landscape as a reach challenge rather than a compliance headache will be better positioned when we’re through the banning phase.   

If you want to talk about navigating the incoming UK legislation, or building a strategy for your own Future Fans – get in touch at hello@twocircles.com.